Ask Anne Claude: Advice for the Red Pill reader

almost 4 years ago

Hello my lovelies.

I’ve been a long time fan of AVFM as well as a teacher; with my recent suspension from answering questions on Quora, and the departure of Emily “Dear Prudence” Yoffe from Slate in favor of a younger model, I feel like it is time for me to bring my counselling efforts to the fore in a place where masculism does not hold sway. You can still ask me to answer questions on Quora but I may not be allowed to answer there, so AVFM permitting, I’ll try to answer them here in future columns if I can.

Oh, and the limericks? Just skip over them if you find them annoying. I still write them because they capture a playfulness and risqué vibe that masculists wish to destroy in society so that gentlemen nary take offence.

Let’s get to it, then.

Dear Anne Claude –

Do men tend to find receiving sympathy more emotionally soothing than women do, and if so, what is the reason for this? I’ve noticed that it seems to be more common for men to bring up the topic of how they were mistreated in the past and had a lot of disturbing stuff happen to them. I wonder if this is because they have more trouble getting over it, or because they thrive off of the sympathy they receive in a way that women usually don’t.

I feel that both women and men can find sympathy to be soothing but women face gendered social approbation in situations where sympathy is offered to them that simply does not happen to men. Men find emotional support when they display weakness, and women find contempt when they admit to weakness. This double standard makes it seem that men embrace victimhood while women seek to get past it as soon as possible.

This leads to an impossible choice: to bring about gender equality, should we toughen up men, or soften women?

For example, consider shelters for victims of domestic violence. 99% of domestic violence shelters cater to men only and reject women as clients, even though both women and men experience domestic violence is roughly equal amounts. This exclusion of female victims from support is because women are expected to “woman up” to adversity, whereas a “squire in distress” gets first priority from both women and men. Masculists openly laugh at the idea that women can be victims of men, and because masculists hold all women responsible for “matriarchy,” they carry a strong and invincible contempt for women and believe that women deserve whatever misfortune befalls them.

Even on those rare occasions when masculists speak to women’s issues, as Emma Watson did in his “HeForShe” speech to the United Nations, no promise is made to women that their issues will be addressed. Indeed, both the “HeForShe” label and their on-line pledge promise to fight only for men’s issues, and ignore women’s completely.

All masculists (99.9% or more) believe that “matriarchy” (rule of the mothers) is the cause of all the negative things in the world, so, if the masculist in question sees divorce as a bad thing, the odds are close to one hundred percent that he will blame “matriarchy” as a proxy for blaming women – in this case, for divorce, despite the fact that 2/3 of the people who file for divorce are men. Blaming the “matriarchy” in this case is a political ploy to deflect criticism from the ways that masculism has created skyrocketing levels of divorce since the rise of the 2nd wave masculism in the 1960s.

Under the myth of the matriarchy, men are never responsible for anything, or indeed, for any part of the civilization that women built for us. How could we be held responsible (or get any credit) for building society? We can’t be because we were too oppressed by women to help! Masculists systematically sanitize history of all references to men’s contributions because acknowledging the importance of men’s and women’s partnerships interferes with the masculist narrative that all men have been oppressed by women (matriarchy) throughout all time.

Because masculists recognize that female-male partnerships like marriage spoil their narrative, not all masculists see divorce as a bad thing. Masculists place men’s conveniences ahead of the welfare of both children and wives, so the fanciful joys of “freeing” a man from marriage via divorce or spinsterhood take priority over the well-established deleterious effect divorce has on wives’ lives and children’s futures. Our prisons are crammed full of people who were raised by single fathers but since most of these prisoners are minority women, it is acceptable to dispose of their lives so that men are allowed to shirk parental and marital responsibilities that used to be a marker of adulthood. You can see an example of this masculist attitude in the YouTube video “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Man,” in which masculists portrayed their contempt for minority women who dare to greet them in public.

Masculist Meghan Murphy wrote in xoJane that: It seems that if men were truly “embracing masculism,” they’d reject such an unnecessary tradition [marriage] so firmly rooted in sexist practices and ideas. While you can’t guarantee commitment or “till death do us part,” you can guarantee is that marriage, over time, has harmed men more than it’s helped them.

Murphy’s claim that a lifetime of financial and emotional support between wives and husbands is somehow harmful to men is one that I find doubtful at best, especially considering that men live longer and happier lives than women, but him notion does explain why masculists are so blasé about divorce rates.

Of course, masculism is itself the reason why you can’t guarantee commitment – “men’s liberation” from their own freely-given wedding vows and “no fault” divorce laws make it legally painless for men to ignore their pledges of sexual fidelity and yet still harvest their wives’ money through alimony, spousal support, and child support payments that are more likely to fund a “boy’s night out” than put food in the kids’ bellies.

For such masculists, divorce is like the pain of an ear-piercing that, while momentarily unpleasant, lets you wear all sorts of stylish earrings that you can change as often as you change sexual hookups, all the while laughing at the poor matriarch you duped, who still has to send you a monthly check even though you are giving her nothing in return.

This is why about 80% of men reject “masculist” as a label – we are keenly aware of how masculism makes us look bad by denying men the right and responsibility to make and keep adult commitments, while masculists are stocking “safe spaces” for men with coloring books.